4 C's February, Day 3 - Tracy McCabe

This month, we focus on the 4 C's: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. Today's entry comes from Tracy McCabe, science teacher at Carmel Valley Middle School:


This Spring myself, Chris Faist, Amy Olson, and Kajyo Yamamoto are embarking on “Genius Hour” with our 7th and 8th grade students at Carmel Valley Middle School. This endeavor is sure to embrace all four Cs not just for our students, but for us as instructors as well.

Also called 20% Time or Passion Projects, Genius Hour stems from a practice at Google. Employees were allowed to use 20% of their work week to explore projects of their choosing, as long as it benefited the company. Gmail, Adsense, Google News, Google Glass and other innovations were created as a result of this self-directed research time.

The goal of Genius Hour is to engage students through inquiry problem solving and critical thinking. Genius Hour allows students the flexibility to choose a topic, research the content that is necessary to learn about their topic, and then solve a problem or present about a topic they are passionate about without the constraints of the typical teacher driven instructional time. Students will be allotted 1 hour a week of class time to select and pursue a topic they feel passionate about. This project may be simply research-based or students may look into an answer to a problem, but each project will include a student-generated question.

It all sounds good in theory, right? We have spent the last several months brainstorming scaffolding, checkpoints, and some sort of format to help students follow an otherwise unstructured pursuit. Numerous websites have come in handy (this is the one we keep coming back to).

What we have come up with are 6 stages students will move through:

• Brainstorming: Generating a question
• The Dry Run: Testing your question
• Predicting Pitfalls
• Make your Pitch
• Do Your Thing: Answer your Question
• Present your Genius

Students will be encouraged to collaborate in their groups in “Sounding Board” meetings as well as allowed to go “Back to The Drawing Board” if a question needs to be tweaked. We intend to have students Blog their process as they pursue their answer and will ask them each Monday to submit this Google Form to document their progress.


Most of all, we hope to encourage skills not necessarily linked to our content. We have come up with six Genius Hour Commandments and accompanying videos we plan to show at the start of each weekly Genius Hour session to inspire students on their journey.

• GH Commandment #1: You are either succeeding or you’re learning
• GH Commandment #2: Think BIG
• GH Commandment #3: Solve a Problem
• GH Commandment #4: Build GRIT (Guts~Resilience~Integrity~Tenacity)
• GH Commandment #5: Creativity Takes Time
• GH Commandment #6: Inspire Others

This is an experiment to be sure. It will not be concealed from our students that we are embarking on our own Genius Hour trying this out. If you’d like to follow our successes and “learning”, we have created a website where we will post student projects once they are presented.